Sometimes Bed Whacking is the Only Thing

byDeborah PenneronJuly 17, 2016

Now is powerful!

I’m beginning to recognize this a completely new way, this full on power of current moment. The fact is that it is all I have. Now is when I get to choose my response to life as it shows up and set my vibrational tone.

My projections into the future aka worry about what might happen or my fixation on past events and how they could have been different or better have absolutely no bearing on this moment right here right now, the place where my choice effects significant change.

Now is always new, always fresh opportunity.

It is the opportunity to move straight into the heart of whatever is showing up.

It’s something that I’ve always known and intellectually grasped, however, it is not something that I’ve consistently practiced. That has grown until now, now, I choose to remember to ask myself if I really want to bring that past event or the projected worry into this present moment? . I’ve had little pieces of practice for a long long time now – 20 years – which makes it easy to choose to focus specifically on this moment, in this moment, this locus of control, this only place where I wield any influence at all.

Now.

I remember dancing that awareness years ago. It is easy on the dance floor … right here, right now is all there is. It is easy to let whatever is there be there. There is magic in that.

I would lose the feel of it when I arrived home, or went into work. Not because I wanted to … I simply did not know how to stay present to the stuff that wasn’t feeling as good as I wanted it to. I did not have the resilience when right here meant the experience of pain. I experienced it as something inherently wrong with me.

The thing is there is immense joy accessible in presence to pain.

To bring pain fully into the heart, allowing it simply to be. I’ve learned that with physical pain over the past 6 years, and now I am extending it to emotional pain. Give it room to breathe and it diffuses. It moves through and becomes simply the messenger, and its function is fulfilled. The molecules of emotion no longer have a need to attach to a cell receptor … they can flow through the lymph and bloodstream, metabolized..

As a nurse I could shift my focus to the pain, both physical and emotional, of others. It was my job. I never metabolized my own. It was so much easier to place my focus outside of me. I wouldn’t break that way. I could numb out and power forward and get what needed to be done done. Years of that.

Now I am choosing to metabolize the pain as it shows up.

What has been showing up is old and profoundly uncomfortable stuff. Rather than telling stories about the emotion, I do whatever is called for. Sometimes it’s tears and wailing. Sometimes it is a thing I have come to deeply appreciate. I call it bed whacking!

I have an old (and unattached) broom handle that I use to beat the stuffin’ out of my bed (with immense gratitude to my bed) and get the anger OUT! It is helpful. Some people break plates, also effective except that I have not found a place where I feel safe leaving the shards of broken plates where someone could find them in their feet, (or make a ton of noise and scare my neighbors) So, yeah. Bed whacking. (Thanks to Chris Collins for this one <3)

It never lasts long and it allows expression and movement of the emotional energy. There is an end to the sensation of old (or new) rage.

Sometimes bed whacking is the path of least resistance.

So much freedom in staying present to what has been pushed down and now desires expression!